Use Rich Snippets to Control Your Online Business Data

It is common knowledge that search engine marketing (or SEM) is highly effective and requires control to be cost efficient for marketing, branding and promotional strategies. Businesses worldwide are quite aware of how important Search Engine Optimization is for customer acquisition.

The vast majority of consumers turn to the internet for their pre-shopping research as well as the offline and online purchase.

The key is making your business products and services visible amongst the millions of other business offerings.

Most importantly, your business needs to be visible to the right searcher, that is, the individual who is actually looking for your product. Also, products and services need to be visible to the consumer at theright time, that is, when the consumer is ready to make a purchase of your product or become a subscriber to your service. This brings up the critical importance of 'relevance'.

While using structured data is not a requirement, eBay heavily encourages its sellers to adhere to its terms.

As of Q1 2016, 60% of listed items on the marketplace used its structured data rules, according to eBay's earnings report. This is up from 37% in Q4 2015.

After a disappointing earnings report in the first quarter, eBay announced its intentions to completely revamp its marketplace experience with Structured Data reflecting new user experiences and product categories to draw in shoppers.

Relevance and the new iteration of Google search

From the Google Developers page:

Emails with markup appear in Google Search results when users look for tickets, flights, and events. Your markup will also help Google Now bring users the right information at just the right time.

The folks at Google have clearly understood that the early adopters of the Internet have evolved into people who want their search engines to give them relevant, instantly usable, actionable results.

The Hummingbird algorithm is a prime example of how Google is syncing its search process to match consumers demands. Search is no longer limited to crawling the web for keyword pages.

The consumer expects a search engine to deliver pages that match intent and not the exact keyword used to search.

Webmasters are moving on from traditional HTML to pages with microdata, JSON-LD or RDFa formats to enhance displays and valuable product or service information. This enhanced display and listing provides a critical function - that of telling the search engine (a machine) how to intelligently read and match the page content to search terms and results.

Rich Snippets add value to your SEM when your business, product and service data is added to HTML to give search engines a better understanding of what your page is all about.

As a result, your entire online and offline business data is consumed and published by search engines.

Taking the rich snippets reins in your hands

The whole point of Search Engine Optimization, or at least, a big focal point in the exercise, is that you gain control of all aspects of your business and make them more visible to your potential customers. Obviously, you want maximum visibility and conversion. In this endeavor, rich snippets lend a hand because they actually help you communicate and enhance what's great about your business, brand, product or service alongside the search results.

Look at it this way, you run a restaurant and your closest competitor is ‘A.J's Grill and Barbecue’:

>> A.J's search listing has no rich snippets and the wrong business hours.

The search engine bot takes your site content, verifies it and publishes it as relevant business data with a highlighted display. Instead of leaving it to a bot to guess what is important to communicate to potential customers, rich snippets put the controls in your hands.

» You get to decide what the searcher sees and this lets you pick and choose the most appealing information and place it in your search result.» You have relevant, useful and attractive information in your search result as opposed to the conventional outdated information presented in A.J's, listing.

Searchers are far more likely to click through to YOUR pages.

Rich snippets for better page ranking

Well, of course Google has a standard disclaimer to protect their intellectual property. They “say” that marking your page content with rich snippets will not impact your search rankings and, they may not even use your markup at all.

However, the reality is Google loves machine readable data and your page does have a better chance of getting higher up in rankings. Google's main goal is to deliver accurate business data and they reward higher click-through rates.

Rich Snippets make your content more accurate and attractive, more visibility to searchers encourages a higher click-through rate.

To sum it up, if you are serious about making your business and brand accurate visible and accessible to your target audience, you should not be leaving it to chance or trusting SEM strategy.

Your audience has evolved from the time you designed your search engine optimization campaign and you need to catch up. Rich snippets let you influence your audience and distinguish your business from the rest of the pack.

We will help make the changes that can make your pages more visible to the right people, the rich snippets more relevant to the searcher's intent and the probability of click through far higher than before!

Talk to us now to ensure that your business is getting all the advantages of Google's advancing search techniques.

Are you ready to 'future-proof' your SEO strategy for the Semantic Web?

Stay tuned for more exciting and informative content from us!

With our 2-step strategy of applying both Semantic MarkupandStructured Data to your website, you will experience between 5% to 10% monthly growth in traffic and sales.

Take action now - every second you wait – is hurting your online revenue …